IMAGES from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America a ABY M. WARBURG ‘Translated with an interpretive essay by MICHAEL P. STEINBERG CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London:Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America Es istein altes Buch 2u blattern, Athen-Oraibi, alles Vettern. Iris a lesson from an old book: the kinship of Athens and Oraibi. If Tam to show you images, most of which I photo- graphed myself, from a journey undertaken some twenty- seven years in the past, and to accompany them with words, then it behooves me to preface my attempt with an explanation. The few weeks I have had at my disposal have not given me the chance to revive and to work through my old memories in such a way that I might offer you a solid introduction into the psychic life of the Indi- ans, Moreover, even at the time, I was unable to give depth to my impressions, as I had not mastered the In- dian language. And here in fact is the reason why it is so difficult to work on these pueblos: Nearby as they live to each other, the Pueblo Indians speak so many and such varied languages that even American scholars have thegreatest difficulty penetrating even one of them. In addi- tion, a journey limited to several weeks could not impart truly profound impressions. If these impressions are now more blurred than they were, 1 can only assure you that, in sharing my distant memories, aided by the immediacy of the photographs, what I have to say will offer an im- pression both of 2 world whose culture is dying out and cf a problem of decisive importance in the general writ- ing of cultural history: In what ways can we perceive es- sential character traits of primitive pagan humanity? The Pueblo Indians derive their name from their sed- entary lives in villages (Spanish: pueblos) as opposed to the nomadic lives of the tribes who until several decades ago warred and hunted in the same areas of New Mexico and Arizona where the Pucblos now live. What interested me as a cultural historian was that in the midst of a country that had made technological cul- ture into an admirable precision weapon in the hands of intellectual man, an enclave of primitive pagan humanity was able to maintain itself and—an entirely sober struggle for existence notwithstanding—to engage in hunting and agriculture with an unshakable adherence to magical practices that we are accustomed to condemning as a mere symptom of a completely backward humanity. Here, however, what we would call superstition goes hand in hand with livelihood. It consists of a religious devotion to natural phenomena, to animals and plants, to which the Indians attribute active souls, which they be- lieve they can influence primarily through their masked dances. To us, this synchrony of fantastic magic and so- ber purposiveness appears as a symptom of a cleavage; for the Indian this is not schizoid but, rather, a liberating experience of the boundless communicability between man and environment. At the same time, one aspect of the Pueblo Indians’ religious psychology requires that our analysis proceed with the greatest caution, The material is contaminated: ABY M. WARBURG Fig. 1. Secpent a lightning Reproduction of an alta floor, kiva omamentation. it has been layered over twice. From the end of the six- teenth century, the Native American foundation was overlaid by a stratum of Spanish Catholic Church educa~ tion, which suffered a violent setback at the end of the seventeenth century, to return thereafter but never offi- cially to reinstate itself in the Moki villages. And then came the third stratum: North American cducation. Yet closer study of Pueblo pagan religious formation and practice reveals an objective geographic constant, and that is the scarcity of water. For so long as the rail- ways remained unable to reach the settlements, drought and desire for water led to the same magical practices to- ward the binding of hostile natural forces as they did in primitive, pretechnological cultures all over the world. Dronght teaches magic and prayer. IMAGES FROM THE REGION OF THE PUEBLO INDIANS